Episode 10: A Means Without End

Episode 10

Wed 20 — Sun 24 Nov 2019 Tramway, Glasgow

A

WITHOUT

MEANS

END

1 Along with a few of the people in this Episode, Arika are part of an informal study group called the Institute of Physical Sociality 1.

It most often takes the form of a Google drive of articles on particle physics and conceptual maths, but occasionally people meet up and geek out. Scientific theorems don’t prove anything outside their very precise contexts.

But the group have been wondering if they can provide generative analogies for reading the complex desires and struggles of social life. Or if their most disturbing findings might be poetic indicators of the impossibility of continuing with dominant ways of understanding existence.

1 – With boychild, Karen Barad, Gabriel Catren, Valentina Desideri, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Marielle Pelissero, Emily Roff, Wu Tsang, Hypatia Vourloumis, Beckett Warzer, Fernando Zalamea and others…

WHAT IF THE INDETERMINACY OF THE PERSONAL PRONOUN, THE RESISTANCE TO THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SINGULAR AND PLURAL, WERE A PROBLEM FOR PHYSICS? WHAT IF PHYSICS IS WHERE YOU GO TO MAKE THE NEWEST, SEXIEST POSSIBLE IMPERSONAL PRONOUN?

Fred Moten

Image from Gravitational Feel, by Fred Moten & Wu Tsang.

2 There have been revolutions in both maths and physics over the last 150 years. Maths now handles very complex relational systems and logics, where objects transform over time, identities are fleeting, truths are relative, and the one and the many can fold and unfold into each other. It can glue together multiple transitory, multidimensional perspectives of a situation, so as to create richer, more detailed, flexible understandings, moving us beyond the atomisation of the world.

In particle physics the void is no longer empty, but teeming with real and virtual activity. Phenomena can be indeterminate, entangled, nonlocal and undermine the logic of cause and effect. Every particle and every consciousness might bear the trace of the whole, and reality is the constant enfolding and unfolding between both the virtual and actual order of things.

This Episode explores the implications of these developments, and what they share with the aesthetics and sociality of queer, POC, trans communities, and anarchist, decolonial or transfeminist worldviews.

WHAT NONLOCALITY EXPOSES IS A MORE COMPLEX REALITY IN WHICH EVERYTHING HAS BOTH ACTUAL (SPACETIME) AND A VIRTUAL (NONLOCAL) EXISTENCE...

WHY NOT CONCEIVE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IN THE SAME MANNER...

AS ENTANGLED WITH EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE? Denise Ferreira da Silva - On Difference Without Separability

Still from 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, By Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Turkey/Greece, Haiti, Australia, Marshall Islands, 2018.

3 For example, Mijke van der Drift and Nat Raha’s notion of radical transfeminism provides us with profound anti-static (trans) tools for navigating contemporary society: where we all have to make sense of relative truths, shifting or dissolving selves and identities and multiple (contradictory) ways of thinking.

Moving beyond binary oppositions, contemporary maths has developed intuitionistic logics which have the capacity to deal in dynamic universals rather than absolute truths — a trans maths running against the grain of supposedly ultimate foundations and unshakable stabilities. How might these two trans and multi-logics enrich each other?

WE / SO BROKEN OUT OF BELONGING TOGETHER

Nat Raha - of sirens, body & faultlines

Although this looks like a screening of 2001 A Space Odyssey inside a piano, it’s actually a photo, (which we took at CERN) of the inside of the instrument that discovered the W & Z Particles.

Photo: Barry Esson. A cross-section of a wire chamber, part of the UA1 experiment, exhibited at CERN.

4 Similarly, poetry uses uses many different linguistic tools to evoke complex meanings that multiply beyond the most obvious reading of a word or phrase. Inspired by the poet Joan Retallack’s great line: “poetics can take you only so far without an h”, Denise Ferreira da Silva has been combining multiple poetic and ethical tools that allow her to undertake hybrid poethical readings: gluing together many complex perspectives that go beyond the most prosaic interpretation of a situation.

This sounds a lot like the gluing of multiple perspectives that the mathematics of sheaf theory provides — listening to the voice of things as it emerges in the back and forth between the ideal/real, analytic/synthetic, local/global or discrete/continuous. What do these practices share, and could they help us to navigate the seemingly ever more complex situations we live through?

TO COME: THE INCOHERENCE OF OUR BODIES IS WHAT WE BRING UP, THE CONDITION OF WHAT WE HAVE TO BRING. TO COME UP: DESPITE THE INSUFFICIENCIES OF THE , CONDITIONS, WE DON T KNOW WHEN TO LEAVE. TO COME UP AGAINST: (THE IMPRESSION OF) SETTLING DEEPLY. Nisha Ramayya - Secretions or Obstructions

Excerpt from Chinnamastā, representing Devı̄ in her destructive and creative aspects. Under her Ratı̄ and Kāma, the female and male principles, depict the transcendence of the phenomenal world and the abolition of the experience of duality. Rajasthan, c. 18th century. Gouache on paper from Mookerjee, Ajit and Madhu Khanna, The Tantric Way: Art, Science, Ritual (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

5 Episodes are serial moments in ongoing study. They feature recurring characters and invite new voices into ongoing conversations.

They’re an excuse to get together to discuss the practice of getting together.

The potential for violence is folded within narrow views and limited perspectives.

To counteract this, we need to cultivate multidimensional thinking. Inspired by the Institute of Physical Sociality, this Episode is about diffracting art and maths, social life and physics though each other, as they resist limited and violent perspectives and generate complex ways of understanding our complex times. It explores an idea of sociality in which we’re all incomplete and entangled in a social mesh, where all parts bear the trace of the whole. It’s about how such sociality has more in common with contemporary maths and particle physics than any of us might have realised.

THE WORLD WAS EVER AFTER, ELSEWHERE, NO WAY WHERE WE WERE WAS THERE.

Nathaniel Mackey – On Antiphon Island—“mu” twenty-eighth part

WEDNESDAY 20 7.30–8pm

Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy - FILM

8.30–9.45pm

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Arjuna Neuman, Fred Moten & Wu Tsang

All and at once - DISCUSSION

THURSDAY 21 1–3.30pm

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Corpus Infinitum - STUDY SESSION

4–6pm

Fernando Zalamea

Entangling history, phenomenology, metaphysics, culture, and mathematics: the model RTSK - STUDY SESSION

7–8pm

Fred Moten & Wu Tsang

Gravitational Feel - OPENING

8–9pm

Laura Harris & Fernando Zalamea

In the Sign of Jonah: Around Moby-Dick - DISCUSSION

9.30–10.30pm Ueinzz

Mobedique Hors Acvé - FILM

FRIDAY 22 1–10.30pm

Fred Moten & Wu Tsang

Gravitational Feel - EXHIBITION

2–4pm

Fernando Zalamea

Workshop on Gestural Maths - STUDY SESSION

4.30–6pm

Stefano Harney

Logistics and Logisticality - STUDY SESSION

7–7.30pm

Nisha Ramayya

States of the Body Produced by Love - READING

8–9.30pm

Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten & Fernando Zalamea

Poetry, Mathematics, Debris - DISCUSSION

10–10.30pm

Alexander Moll & Jackie Wang

Cottonmouth Liturgy - PERFORMANCE

SATURDAY 23 1–10.30pm

Fred Moten & Wu Tsang

Gravitational Feel - EXHIBITION

2–4pm

Fred Moten & Fernando Zalamea

Discussion on Mathopoetics - STUDY SESSION

4.30–6pm

Alexander Moll & Jackie Wang

Vorticity in the Eternal Hum - STUDY SESSION

7–7.45pm

boychild & Fernando Zalamea

Borders between Mathematics, Gestures and Dance - PERFORMED CONVERSATION

8.15–9.40pm

Jay Bernard, Mijke van der Drift Future Ruins: transfeminism, austerity and & Nat Raha the archives - DISCUSSION

10–10.40pm

boychild

Untitled Hand Dance - PERFORMANCE

SUNDAY 24 1–10.30pm

Fred Moten & Wu Tsang

Gravitational Feel - EXHIBITION

2–3.30pm

James Goodwin & Nisha Ramayya

The utterly in common, or bodies of colour in the flesh - STUDY SESSION

4–6pm

Mijke van der Drift & Nat Raha

Multilogics and Poetics of Radical Transfeminism - STUDY SESSION

7–7.25pm

Jay Bernard

Something Said - FILM & READING

7.30–8.00pm

James Goodwin

aspects caught in the headspace we’re in - READING

8.30–9pm

Nat Raha

apparitions - READING

9.15–10pm

Nathaniel Mackey

Reading from his work – READING

EXHIBITION

WED 20

Gravitational Feel Fred Moten & Wu Tsang Thurs: 7.30 – 10.45pm Fri: 1 – 10.30pm Sat: 1 – 10.30pm Sun: 1 – 10.30pm INSTALLATION Tramway 4 Can the knotting of ropes according to a poem’s rhythm make the social pulse of language matter? Gravitational Feel is a sculpture-performance by Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, who together cohabit the roles of poet and performance artist.

The work continues their collaboration on the poetics of intimacy and is a researchexperiment into how to sense entanglement.

Using fabric and sound Gravitational Feel produces a series of ‘chance events’ as an experiment in blurring the social and physical significance of touch and voice, as well as questions of space and time in matter.

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy

By Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman Turkey/Greece, Haiti, Australia, Marshall Islands, 2018, 29 minutes 7.30 – 8pm FILM SCREENING Tramway 1 English Subtitles Diffracting the theoretical physicist David Bohm’s idea of implicancy — the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders” — through ideas of fluidity and phase-changes between different states of matter, 4 Waters poetically collages a constant folding and unfolding between simple and perhaps more fundamental ways of reading reality. It asks why the Western mind considers the restricted, simplistic and colonial worldview to be ‘common sense’, as opposed to the radical, generative movement of blackness as a mode of existing in the world: an existence underneath or prior to the Western mind, and the ground that makes possible entirely different ethics and ways of living.

Denise and Arjuna’s exhibition Corpus Infinitum, featuring their follow up to 4 Waters will be at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow from 23 April to 7 June 2020.

Gravitational Feel was commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, as part of Corpus.

BOOKS Aye Aye Books & Category Is Books, our two favourite independent booksellers, will be setting up stalls in the Tramway with a special selection of their stock that responds to the themes, ideas and participants at the Episode.

THU 21 All and at once Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Fred Moten & Wu Tsang 8.30 – 9.45pm DISCUSSION Tramway 1 STTR Why won’t the idea of the particle or individual go away? What becomes of movement once stripped of development?

What can a human be without its crutches of life-time and measure? The measurement problem explains how when representing something you inflect your position or agenda on it. Is this an issue for both filmmaking and quantum physics? Do fundamental particle physics and the ethics these artists practice both propose a reality beyond relationality and speak more of a kind of oneness? And how do Denise and Arjuna, Fred and Wu embody or apply these kinds of ideas within the topography of their artmaking collaborations?

Corpus Infinitum Denise Ferreira da Silva 1 – 3.30pm STUDY SESSION Tramway 1 STTR Does the nature of art, social life, blackness, and anti-colonial struggle have something more than a merely metaphorical relationship to the nature of the physical world? Can concepts emerging from particle physics—such as nonlocality, implicancy or virtuality— allow a different understanding of human existence to be imagined? One that is both less and more-than-human, where attending to our differences doesn’t presuppose our separability from each other.

Entangling history, phenomenology, metaphysics, culture, and mathematics: the model RTSK Fernando Zalamea 4 – 6pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR Our times are defined by narrow views and limited perspectives. Poetry, art and maths can help us to move against rigidity, obstructions and violences. They offer us analogies for multidimensional thinking, helping us linger in the difference we share. Fernando will introduce some key contemporary mathematical ideas and talk about how they help us find meaning in the complexities of our lived experience through embracing a trans understanding of our sociality.

We’ll think about mathematical ideas (rather than do sums) as they structure worldviews, which maybe we just didn’t ever think about in terms of maths before.

(THU 21 CONTINUED)

Gravitational Feel: Opening Fred Moten & Wu Tsang 7 – 8pm EXHIBITION OPENING Tramway 4 “Gravitational Feel is a kinetic sculptural performance. It is activated in movement and touch, in the mutual rub, shift and lap of its sonic, wooden, steel, textile and human material. As you mix the sound, in your movement in and across a circle formed by (squared) speakers, the ropes move, becoming strings in having been brushed and strummed by you. In their turn, in the turning of the rotaries from which they fall, the strings move you with their touch, just as in touching one another you move one another, either directly or by the messages you send from strand to strand. In this way, Gravitational Feel is an engine for intensifying the differentiation of our entanglement, continually programming itself through incalculable combinations of disruption and convergence. Your movements, which are neither destructive nor curatorial, are both deconstruction and cure. Therefore, Wu and Fred kindly request your steadfastly refraining from any attempt to be still.”

- Wu Tsang & Fred Moten

In the Sign of Jonah: Around Moby-Dick Laura Harris & Fernando Zalamea 8 – 9pm DISCUSSION Tramway 1 STTR C. L. R. James read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick through its queer, indigenous, working class, motley crew, as it charts an anti-capitalist map of the “living madness” of industrial civilization, on fire and plunging blindly into darkness.

In helping us understand the fundamental

and abysmal swing between the given and Utopia in modern life, does a mathematical reading of Moby Dick offer us a profound abstract orientation with which to understand our times? As we follow the book — as we sink in the bottom of the abyss to then be able to ascend, or rise to high cusps to be able to later descend — we mirror the transits of contemporary maths, moving between the local and the global, the real and the ideal, crossing through the penumbral zones, the half-darkness and outposts of the obscure where our lives are lived.

Mobedique Hors Acvé Ueinzz 9.30 – 10.30pm FILM SCREENING Tramway 1 English & Portuguese, with and without subtitles or translation “Remote pasts meet remote futures. Dancing robots wave to the lonely traveller. Burning fat from whales feeds the citizen-consumer zombification process. Now everything burns! Precarious lodger, we will be in the dark, castaways of a world that does not belong to us. Terrans, in the company of jellyfish, we follow the hunting, the escape, the astrology and the holograms of the Mobedique Whale.” Ueinzz have created a video specifically for Episode 10, made from overlays, cutouts, and different situations as they created and staged their play Mobedique Hors Acvé.

Access and Translation Ueinzz are from São Paulo, Brazil.

As a site for translation between different worldviews, the video will have dialogue, subtitles, maybe some text in both in Portuguese and English. As in all translation, not everything can be understood; but something can be felt.

FRI 22 Workshop on Gestural Maths Fernando Zalamea 2 – 4pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR The most poetic way to grasp maths as a way of thinking is to move away from ideas of calculation and embrace a kind of gestural understanding. Like the motto of Mary in Metropolis by Fritz Lang — “the mediator between the brain and the hands must be the heart” — gestures allow the body itself to express the abstract sense of mathematical thought, through a cordial (heartfelt), harmonious coupling between intuition and demonstration, a back and forth between matter and spirit. Somehow real hands can caress ideal concepts. This session will present a more intuitive, tactile way of understanding the mathematical ideas Fernando uses to think about culture, ethics and art.

Logistics and Logisticality Stefano Harney 4.30 – 6pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR “Modern logistics originates in the Atlantic slave trade, but the first horrible vessel of logistics is not the slave ship but the individual as 'he' emerges 'emploted' in Europe at the rosy dawn of capitalism.

The ability to posit oneself in the universal position on the map, the abstract position that is at once everywhere and nowhere in time and space gets put into motion by logistics, with, as Denise Ferreira da Silva puts it, 'the lethal deployment of the individual.' Yet from the outside of logistics it is loss not placement that motivates this ultimate capitalist science, and that loss is

the justifiable fear that logistics cannot capture sharing on the move, or what Fred Moten and I have called our logisticality.”

- Stefano Harney

States of the Body Produced by Love Nisha Ramayya 7 – 7.30pm READING Tramway 1 STTR Love is a many-headed snake in Nisha Ramayya’s debut poetry book, twisting its way through devotion, sacrifice and bliss.

Ranging across genres and forms, mixing poetry, prose, autobiography and theory, States of the Body Produced by Love conjures an opalescent world by way of heritage, ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems.

Desire, eroticism and care contain the possibilities of shame, fury and destruction.

Moving towards and away from love, being translated and transformed by love, suffering under love and refusing its power.

Poetry, Mathematics, Debris Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten & Fernando Zalamea 8 – 9.30pm DISCUSSION Tramway 1 STTR Is it possible to use mathematical ideas to model ways to stitch together scattered fragments of a shattered situation into a picture of the whole, revealing a rigid past, but also our possible transit into an open future? Can we think of improvisation not as acting without foresight, an act the Western mind associated with animals, but as a kind of looking backward while

(FRI 22 CONTINUED)

SAT 23

moving ‘forwards’? A kind of historical seeing that tends against separation?

Is this the kind of seeing that Nathaniel Mackey’s writing inhabits, under the image of a 'wounded kinship', located within the drift and “'broken' claim(s) to connection" of the Black Atlantic?

Cottonmouth Liturgy Alexander Moll & Jackie Wang 10 – 10.30pm PERFORMANCE Tramway 1 STTR A multi-media harp and spoken word tribute to the incalculable, the in-deducible, the suspicious static noise that accompanies the voice of truth, and the attempted aberrations in the domain of emergence.

“This performance grew out of our attempts to keep the dividing pressures of statistical reasoning at bay. We will explore enmeshment through sonic and visual registers.”

Discussion on Mathopoetics Fred Moten & Fernando Zalamea 2 – 4pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR When asked what it meant to be shipped, the great Martinican writer Edouard Glissant suggested it was the ‘consent not to be a single being’. Moving beyond Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’, Fred’s writing proposes blackness as a mode of life that exceeds the murderous notion of individuals, and any relationship between them. Fernando charts mathematics’ revolution away from fixed objects towards tools that can anchor differences and simultaneously construct synthetic visions.

Is a poetics of blur analogous to the mathematical integration of margins and borders? Can either or both move beyond the relational? And what might this mean for urgent political ideas such as consent, which rely on it?

Vorticity in the Eternal Hum Alexander Moll & Jackie Wang 4.30 – 6pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR Jackie and Alexander will consider the relationship between the eternal hum of the oceanic beloved and the persistence of vorticity in fluid dynamics. “We’d like to talk about the Kármán vortex street— a pattern of vortices that is responsible for the ethereal sound produced by aeolian harps, or when the wind blows through telephone wires. I’ve been obsessed with an anecdote about how Alice Coltrane came to play the harp. After John Coltrane died, a harp he had ordered when he was still alive arrived. It sat by a window unplayed,

and she would listen to the sound made by the wind when it blew through the strings.

She decided to learn the harp as an act of bereavement... reading through some of her spiritual writings I’m realizing that this little story is connected to her whole sonic philosophy…” – Jackie Wang Borders between Mathematics, Gestures and Dance boychild & Fernando Zalamea 7 – 7.45pm PERFORMED CONVERSATION Tramway 1 STTR The French communist and radical gay activist, philosopher and mathematician Gilles Châtelet thought that maths was best understood as gestures: articulations in motion that collapse what we want to say into how we say it. How does this relate to how boychild thinks about ‘the world’s moments enfolded’, or what the writer André Lepecki calls ‘choreopolitics’ — the gestures of protest that are made even within the tightest, policed spaces?

In this performed conversation, Fernando will share a gesture that sums up a mathematical concept with boychild. boychild will respond with a gesture of her own. And back and forth like this, maybe with some chatting.

Future Ruins: transfeminism, austerity and the archives Jay Bernard, Mijke van der Drift & Nat Raha DISCUSSION 8.15 – 9.40pm Tramway 1 STTR Jay Bernard, Nat Raha, and Mijke van der Drift will discuss the archives as a means to question futurity. Drawing on poetics, film,

and multilogical ethics they will question disappearances of social knowledge, intergenerational organising within radical communities, queer and trans (of colour) disruptions of archives and the possibilities for translations of past events to present practices. Wavering between fragmented understandings and different operational logics of actions, knowledges and affects, radical transfeminism aims to hold the space for finding relations between the ruins of the everyday. Emerging from the debris, spaces for politics find form as poetics to carry understandings, actions and be/longings.

Untitled Hand Dance boychild 10 – 10.40pm PERFORMANCE Tramway 1 Silent “Movement is a way for me to think about the social implications embedded in the choreographies of space. When and how and where people are allowed to move.

In what ways one can move. Improvisation holds space for movement in constraint.

For some of us, more than others, enclosure is a familiar condition. Capitalism’s chase, its algorithmic appetite. These hand dances are notations, sifting compositions with the world’s moments enfolded. Hidden in the hands an alluvial transcription of reach and embrace. The final flickers of the body’s expression, caress and touch. Haptic grasp.

Emphatic abandon, ephemeral betrayal.

An atmosphere of messages.” - boychild

SUN 24 The utterly in common, or bodies of colour in the flesh James Goodwin & Nisha Ramayya 2 – 3.30pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR “Beginning where breath emanates and holds poetry’s 'life-ending and life-making' moments, when the body of colour fleshes out the constant, social, alternative presence of the 'utterly in common', is where you and me end, where we don’t so much come together but are already here with each other. We’re thinking about talking about the nervous tick that interrupts the spiritual/mystical, the 'ictic tenancy' of breath as the preservation and/of the decay of place; the sociopoetic cosubstantiality of 'risking your life' and 'taking part', love and violence, and auto-erotic-decapitation-ah! Thinking about talking about preservation and decay, preservation as decay; its ritual translation of form and substance that presumes relation, that precludes dissolution, on the basis of an a priori separation that cannot but find its end in the presumption.

So we’re getting together in the flesh, performing relation and preserving its decay, staging our thinking and talking to not let each other not get lost!”

- James Goodwin & Nisha Ramayya

Multilogics and Poetics of Radical Transfeminism Mijke van der Drift & Nat Raha 4 – 6pm STUDY SESSION Studio STTR “In this workshop, we will trace the outlines of the interactions between poetics — a means of experimenting with linguistic

structures to unearth meanings, knowledges and affects — with multilogics, an approach to variable truth formations and axiomatic orderings. We will discuss these approaches from the perspective of radical transfeminism, with a particular focus on the 'anti-static' as a means to refuse the stable order of reproduction and the stasis of the class war, with its redistribution of resources from rich to poor. Radical transfeminism concerns itself with finding ways of negation, refusal and navigation between the logics, evaluations, and affects of dominant orders, opening relations between different logics that emerge from within forms of life. Transfeminist and queer bodies are at the centre of such actions and refusals, opened by poetics as a means to negation and affirmation between the fault lines of cohering orders.”

- Nat Raha & Mijke van der Drift Something Said Jay Bernard 7 – 7.25pm FILM SCREENING & READING Tramway 1 English Subtitles on Film, Reading STTR The New Cross Fire was a major tragedy in 1981 that claimed the lives of 13 young black people and was initially met with state, media and police indifference.

Haunted by that history, and in the context of the recent rise of the far-right and the tragedy of Grenfell, Jay Bernard’s film Something Said, and their award winning poetry both undertake a queer exploration of black British history, starting with this particular moment in time and examining its ramifications at two scales: the larger social and political rupture that followed the fire, and the smaller, individual attempt to reconcile one's queer present and the black radical past. Drawing from the debris

of history, Jay’s writing explodes the homogeneity of our times, interspersing it with ruins to reveal a wider perspective of life in the UK, where past and present are folded within each other on both social and intimate scales. aspects caught in the headspace we’re in James Goodwin 7.30 – 8pm READING Tramway 1 STTR “Aspects caught in the headspace we’re in is on the blacksociopoetics of breath, the dyscompositional topology of its runaway cadence, homonymic exchanges and idiomatic differentiation that make the work a body of work on the run/rhumb, on a line of constant bearing, curve, fugitive tilt, a beginning without origin, turning, slurring, folding, and spinning the content and context of its various places and occurrences into misrecognition, where the social life of poetry proliferates through the impure, formless, and felt remonstrance of breath as the emanation of friendship, musicality, love, air, displacement, earth, antisubjectivity, loxodromes, death, decay, preservation, and realness.” - James Goodwin apparitions Nat Raha 8.30 – 9.00pm READING Tramway 1 STTR Nat Raha presents new work in the nine.

Nat’s work is a creopolitan post-punk writing, in which queer and trans bodies stage their dis/appearance, refusing legibility in dominant forms of appearance, feeling, syntax, language or sound. The

work deploys the 'niner': a contemporary poetic form, invented by the poet Mendoza, rooted in containment and expansion through sequences and re-ordering — a truncated 'sonnot'. In the form of the nine, obsession and compulsion meets mathematics in the undergrowth of modern poetry. Furthermore, in the hour of fascism, all aspects of art and existence may need to be weaponised, to offer new and old modes of resistance in living, and to valorise what has been forgotten.

Nathaniel Mackey 9.15 – 10.00pm READING Tramway 1 No STTR or Interpretation Mackey’s writing draws on Sufi and West African mysticism and music, Bedouin traditions, the Quran, African American music and history, and ideas of love, nothingness, initiation and spiritual journeys. His poetry and fiction exist in continuous transit between language that conjures an imaginary music and music from which language floats. His criticism helps us understand discord and divergence as a 'discrepant engagement': noticing the violent disparity between societies’ presumed norms and the lived experience that those norms work to eradicate or exploit. His idea of the 'tellingly inarticulate' frames choosing not to make sense as a way to reject and indict racist societies and the ways they make sense to themselves.

The New York Times described him as a writer of “realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today”.

WHO'S INVOLVED

Jay Bernard is a writer from London.

Their work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in the archive. They won the 2018 Ted Hughes Award for Surge: Side A, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the New Cross Fire in 1981. Jay’s short film Something Said has screened in the UK and internationally. Jay is a programmer at BFI Flare, an archivist at Mayday Rooms and resident artist at Raven Row.

James Goodwin is a poet and PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group. His research is focused on blacksociopoetics, an approach to reading applied to a poetic, philosophical, theoretical, critical and ethical understanding of the social life of poetry.

boychild is a movement-based performance artist whose work operates through improvisation as a mode of survival and world-building, in the liminal, performative space where becoming meets representation.

Adamant about the visceral experience of live visual performance, boychild makes a case for how the movement of form can communicate what remains impenetrable through images and language.

Stefano Harney thinks and teaches about the social idea of study, infrastructure, cultures of finance, leisure, public administration, the university, autonomism, logistics and blackness. His book with Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study rejects our desire to end our troubles, and instead focuses 'beyond the beyond', where we might end the world that created those troubles in the first place.

Mijke van der Drift works on Nonnnormative Ethics which engages with the question how forms of life outside of the dominant norm find ways of relation and evaluation. Mijke makes films in collaboration with Alex Reuter. Together with Nat Raha and Chryssy Hunter, Mijke has been working internationally on Radical Transfeminism.

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a Brazilian philosopher, ethicist and artist, tarot reader, reiki master, student of unreasonable knowledges, and Gemini. Her book Toward a Global Idea of Race asks “why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of colour, is there no ethical outrage?“, and presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space.

Laura Harris wrote one of our favourite ever essays: What Happened to the Motley Crew? Her book Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and attempt to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms that constitute what she calls 'the aesthetic sociality of blackness'.

Nathaniel Mackey is one of the most celebrated poets emerging from the Black Radical Tradition. His ongoing series From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate is some of the best writing ever about or as jazz, by being written as jazz.

His critical essays offer us profound tools for understanding formal experimentation in poetry, literature and music and how they address the problems and paradoxes

of social life. He’s an encyclopaedic jazz and world music radio DJ and probably your favourite poet’s favourite poet.

Alexander Moll studies quantum chaos and the gnarly waves at the edges of things.

He is currently a teacher and post-doctoral researcher in mathematics at Northeastern University and previously studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris, which was the academic home to two of the 20th century’s coolest mathematical minds Alexander Grothendieck and René Thom.

If you ask him, Fred Moten might say that what people often think of as his poetic and philosophical thinking and writing — about fugitivity, blackness, blur — isn’t his at all. It’s better conceived as a temporary and fleeting emanation of open-ended friendships within the black radical tradition; histories of performance; the music of blackness; and sites of care.

Most often, these have included Stefano Harney, Laura Harris or Wu Tsang, but also hundreds of others.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. He works with the essay form with a multi-perspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.

"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade.

Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level

transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible…

They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity."

– Sean Bonney Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and is currently based in London. Her debut collection States of the Body Produced by Love is published by Ignota Books (September 2019). She is a member of the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK research group and a lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

Wu Tsang is a filmmaker and performance artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalised narratives, and the act of performing itself.

Tsang re-imagines racialised, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm.

We think of Ueinzz as a weekly, ongoing practice of sociality, under the sign of theatrical care: an open rehearsal for a play and political future that is yet to arrive, but is brought closer by practicing it here and now. Ueinzz exists within the set of ever-changing relationships between users of mental health services, therapists, actors, so-called psychotic patients, carers, philosophers, and people whose lives hang by a thread. They amplify the flows and worldviews produced by supposed ‘illnesses’

(WHO’S INVOLVED CONTINUED)

HOW TO ATTEND

into a theatre capable of reversing power over life into the potential of life.

They reveal the disturbing ‘normality’ that surrounds us every day.

Tramway 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE 0845 330 3501 www.tramway.org

Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster and author of Carceral Capitalism: “one of the most wide-ranging, critical, and theoretically nuanced examinations of the political economy of the carceral state in the USA to date” - Socialist Project. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb.

Pay What You Can All events are Pay What You Can, just turn up on the day. Attend for free if that makes the most sense for you. But if you can afford to pay, please do. A suggested average daily payment is £8, although less is also fine and more is welcomed if you have the means.

Please come to as many events as you like, regardless of what you pay. Pay by cash or card at the Arika Desk in the Tramway Foyer, or for Study Sessions, outside the Studio.

Fernando Zalamea is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, cultural critic and writer living in Bogotá. He opens up the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggest to any of us who have ever read an epic novel, been moved by a piece of art, or wonder about the complexity of human understanding and social life. His thinking weaves together strands of the modern and postmodern, the rational and the romantic into a synthetic universality, endlessly revisable and updatable, and puts forward an idea of the trans and transmodernity as a term to encompass our unfolding epoch.

Study Sessions Study Sessions are informal, slightly more intimate spaces and a chance to geek out.

Some might be presentations, some might be workshops; each will open out the ideas and themes in the Episode, led by people who’ve been considering them for ages.

Each Study Session has a capacity of 70 people. Spaces are on a first come, first served basis on the day. If you would like to reserve a space for any particular reason for access needs, if travelling from distance e.g.), then please get in touch.

Get in Touch If there is anything we can do to make attending the Episode easier for you, or if you have questions about what events might suit you, please get in touch and we’ll try our best to help – info@arika.org.uk or 0131 556 0878 or get us on Facebook Messenger.

Venue Tramway is on Albert Drive in the Southside of Glasgow, next to Pollokshields East train station. Tramway has step free access to the public and performance spaces and automatic double-width main doors. Their upper floor, where we will have the Study Sessions and the Quiet Space, is accessible by an elevator. For more access details about Tramway please visit www.bit.ly/ TramwayAccess and www.tramway.org/ Pages/visit-and-contact.aspx. Also please note that Pollokshields East station is only accessible by flight of stairs.

Arika Information Desk Our Arika Desk staff will be present for day-of access requests, including reserving you a seat based on your access needs, showing you where best to sit for the STTR, to chat to you about the content of the events or answer any queries.

Bathrooms Tramway has two gender-neutral single-occupant wheelchair accessible facilities available in the main foyer and one in their quieter upper foyer.

In addition, they have two sets of genderneutral toilets in the main foyer, and two sets of gender-specific toilet facilities in the upper foyer.

Captioning - STTR Events where Stage To Text Reporting (STTR) is provided are noted in the programme. This involves the verbatim transcription of dialogue into text form as it is spoken live. Text is displayed as captions on a screen within the space. All films that are screening will have subtitles.

Quiet Space There will be a Quiet Space in the Upper Gallery which will have a range of comfortable seating, low light levels, stim materials, lego, ear defenders, ear plugs, and a selection of reading and drawing materials. This is a space for anyone who needs to chill out a bit, relax and take time out from the events and the bustle. It's designed around the needs of autistic people, but everyone is welcome.

Open during the following times: Wed: 7 – 10pm Thurs: 1 – 10.45pm Fri: 1 – 11pm Sat: 2 – 10.45pm Sun: 2 – 10.30pm

Open during the following times: Wed: 7 – 10pm Thurs: 12.30 – 10.45pm Fri: 1 – 10.45pm Sat: 1 – 11pm Sun: 1 – 10.15pm

BSL There will be no default British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation.

If you would like to attend any of the events and require BSL interpretation to do so, we will try to make that happen. Contact us, with as much notice as possible on info@arika.org.uk.

Content Notes This Episode will involve improvised conversations and events whose content cannot be predicted. There could be topics or images that come up that some might find upsetting. We’ll make announcements before events, where appropriate. If you have any questions or concerns – speak to staff at the Arika Desk.

OTHER ARIKA ACTIVITIES Archive

Local Organising

Our new work grows out of the old, so a good introduction to what Arika does can be found in the online archive that we’ve been building. It hosts videos, audio files, photos and texts of nearly everything we’ve done since 2003. It includes Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Wadada Leo Smith and Fred Moten shooting the breeze, Hortense Spillers chatting about flesh and empathy, Samuel Delany reading from his memoirs and Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri giving a collective tarot reading.

Check it out here: www.arika.org.uk/archive

Part of our work at Arika is something we call local organising. We do our best to act in solidarity with local groups whose ideas, experiences and struggles we feel especially connected to, recognising how critical the resistance of these groups is. We co-operate closely with specific groups who are pushing back against the violence of racist borders, poverty and criminalisation of sex work; taking their lead on projects they want to see happen. A few of those events are open to a wide public, like parts of the Sex Workers’ Festival of Resistance, most are specifically with smaller groups and are not broadly advertised. Other events we organise, such as the Episodes, are directly nourished and informed by the multiple insights they generate.

The archive helps us reflect on what Arika is, how we learn, change over time, and how we might engage in the problems we’re embedded in, locally and internationally.

We hope it proves useful and interesting to you too. If you have questions, or thoughts, don't hesitate to drop us a line at info@arika.org.uk.

Follow Us Facebook.com/00arika00 Twitter.com/00arika00 Instagram.com/00arika00 Issuu.com/arika

Episode 10 Co-produced by:

Supported by:

Design by Julia www.julia.studio

Media Partner:

Landsat 7 Reveals Large-scale example of a Kรกrmรกn vortex street pattern in clouds.

Image courtesy Bob Cahalan, NASA GSFC.

Complex ways of understanding our complex times. Maths & Poetics. Gesture & Physics.

Collectivist Struggle & Desire.

5 days of performances, discussions, screenings and study sessions about how the art and thought of collectivist desires, the complex flow of contemporary maths and the counterintuitive realities of particle physics can help us grow the capacity to be one another’s means without end.

Jay Bernard | boychild | Mijke van der Drift | Denise Ferreira da Silva | James Goodwin | Stefano Harney | Laura Harris | Nathaniel Mackey | Alexander Moll | Fred Moten | Arjuna Neuman | Nat Raha | Nisha Ramayya | Wu Tsang | Ueinzz | Jackie Wang | Fernando Zalamea If there is anything we can do to make attending the Episode easier for you, please get in touch.

More information at: www.arika.org.uk